On Thursday Politico ran a highly-shared story arguing that Trump’s near-total dominance of media coverage of the Republican presidential race was fading fast. They included a graph plotting the total number of mentions of Trump on broadcast television since June 16, 2015 (when Trump entered the race), which showed him peaking the day after the first debate and collapsing over the following weeks to just 7% of his former coverage, before rebounding slightly. The problem with Politico’s graph is that it misses the fact that Trump accounts for a substantial fraction of the GOP race media coverage, meaning that his ups and downs tend to reflect the overall ups and downs of the entire GOP field. Put simply, if you plot instead the percent of all GOP mentions Trump accounts for, rather than the raw number of times he is mentioned, you get a very different picture in which he is not fading at all.

The timeline above shows the percent of all mentions of any GOP candidate from June 16, 2015 to present on national television networks Aljazeera America, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, Comedy Central, FOX Business, FOX News, LinkTV, and MSNBC using the Internet Archive's Television News Archive. It takes Trump about two weeks after his original announcement to reach a steady level of around 60% of all GOP candidate mentions each day, a position which he has held ever since. Though his numbers ebb and flow from as high as 80% to as low as 33% over the following three months there does not appear to be any significant long-term downward trend in his media coverage.

Why does this look so different than Politico’s? Take a look at the timeline below, which plots the raw number of mentions of Trump (in red) compared with the total number of mentions of any GOP candidate (in blue). Notice how the two are almost perfectly aligned and how the high point in Politico’s graph right after the first debate is actually just an artifact of elevated coverage of the entire GOP field as all of the post-debate coverage fervently analyzed who won and lost.

Number mentions of Donald Trump in national television coverage June 15 - September 17 by day compared with all GOP mentions (Credit: Kalev Leetaru)

In other words, it’s not that coverage of Trump peaked with the first debate and has been falling ever since – it’s that Trump accounts for such a large percent of all coverage of the GOP field that his ebbs and flows are those of the GOP field as a whole and looking at his coverage as a percentage of the field, he’s certainly not fading into oblivion.

Who’s accounting for the rest of the coverage? Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina seem to be the biggest winners of late, with significant bumps since their performances in the first debate. However, the second debate seems to have hurt Carson and giving Fiorina a boost of coverage about her standout performance.

Of course, Politico isn’t the first to struggle with estimating the media environment around the 2016 race. Properly assessing media coverage is far more complex than it might seem, requiring careful attention to precisely what you’re measuring and how you account for the constantly changing environment. In this case, the captivating story of Trump in freefall is flipped on its head to Trump marching along solidly stable, just by looking at percentages instead of raw numbers.

You can follow along from home using this mobile-friendly daily leaderboard of American national television coverage that I collaborated with Internet Archive and The Atlantic to create, or drill deeply into the numbers.

Stay tuned as I bring a data-driven approach to the 2016 campaign season.

Based in Washington, DC, I founded my first internet startup the year after the Mosaic web browser debuted, while still in eighth grade, and have spent the last 20 years working to reimagine how we use data to understand the world around us at scales and in ways never befor...